relevance theory

questions

relative clauses

negation

modal

logical form

Journal of Semantics

This paper proposes a semantics for declarative and interrogative complements and for so-called responsive verbs, like know and forget, which embed both kinds of complements. Following Groenendijk &amp; Stokhof (1984), we pursue a uniform account in the sense that we take both kinds of complements to be of the same semantic type and we assume a single lexical entry for each responsive verb. This approach avoids a number of problems for non-uniform theories, such as the reductive theories of Karttunen (1977), Heim (1994), Lahiri (2002), Spector &amp; Egré (2015), among others, and the twin relations theory of George (2011). On the other hand, our account also addresses the main limitation of Groenendijk &amp; Stokhof's (1984) proposal, which is that it is primarily designed to derive strongly exhaustive readings for interrogative complements. Our account is more flexible in that it straightforwardly derives non-exhaustive and intermediate exhaustive readings as well.

A Uniform Semantics for Declarative and Interrogative Complements